Ultimately, I don’t need a reason to take the long route and smell the roses. I do that on my own if I blasted well feel like it. If I want to jump in and start playing, especially in those instances when I’m meeting up with friends, travel time is onerous.

Put another way, if you have quick travel, there’s still the option of walking. You’re catering to both preferences, and players have control over how they get around. If you don’t have quick travel, you’re cutting out those who don’t feel like dealing with yet another time sink, and giving them reasons to log off, perhaps for good.

Forget immersion. If your world is interestingly designed and fun to play in, players will be plenty “immersed” and keep playing (and paying). Forcing players to take the long route in your game might be an effort to make them “respect the game world” (an argument for permadeath as well), but you’re not respecting your players’ time. That’s a cardinal sin in game design.

One of the great things I’ve found in my travels is how and where you play the game has a lot to do with how you perceive the tedium in the game. In this case, almost all the South Korean MMO players I know play in large cafes. You come over, sit down at the computer, pay for a couple of hours play time, and spend time with friends while playing. Tedium is a lot less tedious when there’s a social setting behind the scenes.

On the other hand, there’s this closet stigma here in the US about MMO players just grinding away in their basement. Well, that happens overseas too — but the concept is taken a bit differently. Usually, that sort of dedication is revered overseas, whereas here, we get a South Park cartoon making fun of killing 3,835,218 boars in WoW to get some shiny mythical sword … while the mom replaces Cartman’s bedpan ever three hours and brings him Cheezypoofs. And all that’s just so the kids can beat some other guy who never leaves his basement.

That’s social negative reinforcement of tedium — but it only works in certain cultures. That’s why Lineage is/was so big overseas as compared to here. I think going forward, MMOs will either need to be more global in how they handle tedium, or else be confined to certain segments of the marketplace.

The same can be said for PvP. Some people love games with negative reinforcement for dying, especially if there’s a corresponding reward for winning. That’s what UO had. Asheron’s Call had much the same mechanic, but it was made easier through a limited loss of items, and a calculated formula for what you would lose on death. That, IMHO, was a good balance. Of course, even that mechanic would likely not fly in any mainstream MMO released today. A large segment of people equate any negative loss of items in PvP as a show-stopping reason NOT to play a certain game. It’s okay to get better equipment, a positive reinforcement, but losing items or XP in PvP is seen as bad. Especially when most MMOs see PvP as a big part of what they want people to do in the end game.

Anyway, good read all around.

Later,

Don!

How often to you feel adventure going somewhere you are forced to go?

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…another thing to think about when considering questing is:

When is the last time you have looked at a quest walk-through in order to complete a quest while leveling? …and I don’t mean asking in general chat what the coordinates of a kill quest monster are.
(assuming the game doesn’t put a giant marker over the location and an arrow pointing towards it on your minimap).

You have a point. Games used to have quests that were actual quests. There might be a handful of gather or kill quests in some form, but they were usually a side thought that didn’t define a game.

Most recent MMO’s basically require questing and on top of that the quests are pathetic. There is such a huge gap between a normal solo quest and a raid instance that it is ridiculous.

In my opinion, a large part of the problem is not having “epic” feeling solo quests / small group quests and quest lines while leveling. There is so much emphasis on end game and doing those raids, that there is little creative thought applied to the journey.

…One thing is the lack of quests that take you on an adventure. There are so many divided up zones that you will go to one and complete a bunch of tasks (won’t even call them quests) and then head to the next zone.

What happened to quests that had you go throughout a continent and complete multiple steps with dungeons, outdoor locations, a bit of farming, and other interesting elements all rolled into one expansive QUEST.

…this just doesn’t exist anymore other than *maybe* at end game… though usually it’s pieced together pvp and the promise of sitting in an instance.

The art of the quest has been lost to being a peasant tediously gathering apples for some npc that you care nothing about.

I hate to blame WoW here, but really, I see it as the first giant step towards the destruction of the “quest”.

That said, the degree by which designers have attempted to distance themselves from it is disheartening. It seems like the New Designer Handbook page 1 reads: If it happened like this in EQ1, do it different. There is a lot to learn from that game. We’ve lost so much of what made it great by worrying about what made it horrible.

The explanation of travel from Brian is just one example. I rarely felt put out by traveling Norrath. If I needed to get somewhere quick I could employ a druid or wizard. If it was close I could get a speed buff. Since quests were largely absent one of the wonders of the game was just touring areas of appropriate level in search of great spots. Finding a neat place to grind was literally a big part of the fun. I miss that and I’m pretty tired of running back and forth to quest hubs.

Fundamentally different game. Counterstrike employs forced grouping to create its own negative social reinforcement. If you play suboptimally, your teammates will tell you.

Modern solo-friendly MMOs do not force grouping and allow players to succeed while still playing poorly. There’s very little in the gameplay before max level of most top-shelf MMOs these days (your WoWs and LOTROs and even EQ2) that compels a player to learn to get better if they don’t group or pvp.

Don’t get me wrong — i prefer today’s solo-friendly MMOs. But they do shrug of a lot of the responsibility of teaching a player how to play by making the games easy enough that you don’t have to play well.

I thought EQ Luclin, WoW regular (and Northrend without flying mounts), and Ac2 all did a great job with travel. It makes the game more immersive and fun to me. If you have to go afk on a flightpath after the 50th time – OH NO. Each of those games gave a bit of ease without ruining exploration and encountering the unpredictable.